“The Bear Market Economics Phenomenon” is an observation of Political Economics. Wall Street Admits: ‘We Got Rich Off the Backs of Workers’ thus creating the Bear Market. The Bear Market is America's default war.
The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.

FAIR USE NOTICE

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. we believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Culture » September 29, 2011

The neoliberal status quo is indefensible—yet the public silently accepts its supposed legitimacy.

The neoliberal dream was basically the economic version of what utopian-minded tech prophets call the singularity: the coming near-mystical convergence of forces.

Future historians will be hard-pressed to know what to make of the giddy reveries of the 1990s. It was not merely the age when sage interpreters of the world system declared the end of history, ideology and other assorted curdled leavings of the modern age; it was also the moment when the global economic order was supposed to be reaching its own great moment of singularity under the placid technocratic rubric of “neoliberalism.”

The neoliberal dream was basically the economic version of what utopian-minded tech prophets call the singularity: the coming near-mystical convergence of forces that would sort out the channels of information and production and knowledge work into a seamless, world-conquering whole.

As social paradigms go, that is plenty ambitious. But as Marxist theorist David Harvey notes, the neoliberal market consensus was also devised to shore up the far more brutish goal of restoring “power to economic elites”—a project that ultimately entails punitive top-down measures that tend to give the lie to the “liberal” side of this market-utopian formulation. Neoliberal societies are marked, he writes, by “a strong preference for government by executive order and by judicial decision rather than by democratic … decision-making.”

When we see the squeeze put on the institutions that shore up neoliberal economies, the results can look like a parody of the sort of popular sovereignty that defines plain-old liberal polities. Witness the disastrous agon that Washington conducted this past summer over the elevation of the debt ceiling: The leaders of our most popular branch of government, the House of Representatives, spun well beyond reach of anything like sane deliberation, hewing instead to a brand of market fundamentalism so extreme that it sent the markets themselves shuddering, once Standard and Poor’s downgraded the United States’ credit rating to AA+.

The S&P report on the downgrade insisted on the need to contain the country’s debt by raising taxes—a measure that the report’s authors rightly divined was a third rail in the present American neoliberal consensus. This point, of course, received virtually no serious attention from the major-domos of economic policy.

Meanwhile, in the eurozone—the sprawling economic bloc lovingly fashioned by the free-trade planners of continental neoliberalism—the specter of unstable debt produced a series of legitimation crises. Greek citizens rose up to protest government cuts that shred the social safety net to bolster the bottom lines of global banks. As the conservative government of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy likewise faced an austerity reckoning, the Italian prime minister-cum-media-mogul did the unthinkable and actually approved an increase in capital gains taxes, while enacting a tax surcharge on the nation’s high-income earners.

In England, meanwhile, working-class youth rioted, which led to draconian police crackdowns after the fact—since neoliberalism also thrives on punitive social control aimed at the lower orders. Because the English uprisings were far more generalized than the unrest on the continent, they betokened something profoundly unsettling to the traditional guardians of neoliberal verities. As Nouriel Roubini, the market savant who divined the onset of the global mortgage meltdown, noted in an eye-opening commentary, the summer’s popular uprisings “are all driven by the same issues and tensions: growing inequality, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness. Even the world’s middle classes are feeling the squeeze of falling incomes and opportunities.”

Roubini stopped short of calling for the workers of the world to throw off their chains—but just barely. He raised an urgent cry for tighter regulation of “a financial system run amok” and even raised the specter of true neoliberal blasphemy: “more progressive taxation.”

When market-seers such as Roubini sound faintly like the reincarnation of Joe Hill, it seems a cause for real hope. But neoliberalism is adept at depoliticizing public discussion of economic policy. So his cri de coeur is likely to meet the same fate that has greeted neoliberalism’s critics on the left for the past three decades: deafening public silence.

ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

Chris Lehmann, a former managing editor of In These Times, is co-editor of BookForum and senior editor of CQ Weekly magazine. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Baffler, Slate.com and the Washington Post. In previous jobs for HearstCorp. and the Tribune Company, he cannot recall senior corporate managers using the words "press" and "freedom" in the same sentence.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Featured Post

In These Times WEB ONLY / FEATURES » APRIL 26, 2016 Thomas Frank on How Democrats Went From Being the ‘Party of the People’ to the P...

The Bear Marketplace

The Bear Market Dynamic

Our faith in capitalistic institutions promotes the pretense of democracy, while it delivers plutocracy, corporate fascism, and militarism. Similarly, imprudent belief in the American Dream induces people to behave in ways that promote the welfare of those in power rather than the perspectives of those of us struggling to be free. Belief in this discredited notion keeps workers from organizing against their oppressors.

A fter D owning S treet. o rg If the Congressional Progressive Caucus Were Progressive By David Swanson The Congressional Progressive C...

“Bear Market Economics” is an expression of Political Economics, an interdisciplinary field focusing on the non-market, collective, and political activity of individuals and organizations. Specific fields of inquiry include regulation, distributive politics, elections, corporate politics, public policy, social welfare, scientific and science policy, political participation and collective action, interest groups, constitutional choice, legislative behavior and organization, judicial institutions, bureaucracies, comparative institutions, cooperative political economy, macro political economy, allocation of resources, the environment, ecology, law and economics, business and government, how markets affect and impact the public and the commons. The orientation to these topics tends to be positive rather than normative.

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. we believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

The American Capitalist Way

Capitalism is preferentially identified by its euphemisms: "Free Enterprise," "market system," "private enterprise." "the American Way," etc. Overt and pervasive partisanship in support of capitalism is not regarded by the American media as an ideological bias negating professional "objectivity" but rather comparable to the serene acceptance of natural laws.